Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022

[Caribbeans]

Renewable generation surpassed coal and nuclear in the U.S. electric power sector in 2022

eia.gov | March 27, 2023

Last year, the U.S. electric power sector produced 4,090 million megawatthours (MWh) of electric power. In 2022, generation from renewable sources—wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and geothermal—surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time. Renewable generation surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in 2021 and continued to provide more electricity than nuclear generation last year.

Natural gas remained the largest source of U.S. electricity generation, increasing from a 37% share of U.S. generation in 2021 to 39% in 2022. The share of coal-fired generation decreased from 23% in 2021 to 20% in 2022 as a number of coal-fired power plants retired and the remaining plants were used less. The share of nuclear generation decreased from 20% in 2021 to 19% in 2022, following the Palisades nuclear power plant’s retirement in May 2022. The combined wind and solar share of total generation increased from 12% in 2021 to 14% in 2022. Hydropower generation remained unchanged, at 6%, in 2022. The shares for biomass and geothermal sources remained unchanged, at less than 1%.

Growth in wind and solar generating capacity drove the increase in wind and solar generation. Utility-scale solar capacity in the U.S. electric power sector increased from 61 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 71 GW in 2022, according to data from our Electricity Power Monthly. Wind capacity grew from 133 GW in 2021 to 141 GW in 2022.

More wind-generated power was produced in Texas than in any other state last year. Texas accounted for 26% of total U.S. wind generation last year, followed by Iowa (10%) and Oklahoma (9%). One of the largest wind farms in the United States (nearly 1,000 megawatt capacity [MW]) came online in Oklahoma in 2022...more
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55960

Yet some proclaim this tech is "useless". Repeatedly. Over and over. "the more the lie is repeated, the more that believe it"

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. I need solar panels as shade for my garden.

It would be nice to have 'plug n play' systems widely available for home owners.

[orthoclad]

9. I have some pole-mount panels

They give me a shaded patio. Adjustable angle for different seasons. Pro installation; high voltage DC is not for amateurs.

[2naSalit]

2. K&R

[NNadir]

3. Replacing coal with gas is a rather dubious proposition. We see what happens when the gas is no...

Last edited Tue Mar 28, 2023, 10:47 PM - Edit history (1)

...longer available in that coal burning hellhole Germany.

The fact is that there has never been a country that has enough wind or solar garbage trashing vast land areas to embrace stupid fantasies like say, hydrogen.

Every so called "renewable energy" system requires redundant systems, almost always gas in the United States, because we have so many assholes willing to cover the destructive and permanent fracturing of the continental bedrock - through much of our waterr travels.

And then we have assholes who want to waste energy by attempting to store it.

Here's the only fact that matters, the one about which illiterate anti-nukes couldn't care less:


March 27: 420.91 ppm
March 26: 420.95 ppm
March 25: 420.73 ppm
March 24: 420.82 ppm
March 23: 420.75 ppm
Last Updated: March 28, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

It took 7 years, 10 months, 30 days days since we first saw readings over 400 ppm, in the week beginning 05/26/2013 until the week beginning April 25, 2021 when we first saw values over 420 ppm.

It took 9 years, 1 month, 22 days, to go from the first reading over 380 ppm in the week beginning 04/04/2004 to the aforementioned first time we saw readings over 400 ppm.

It took 11 years, 10 months, 11 days to go from the first time we saw readings over 360 ppm, in the week beginning 5/24/1992.

It took 12 years, 2 months and one day to go from the first time we saw readings over 340 ppm in the week beginning 3/23/1980.

That was four years after we first saw a journal founded for a putative "hydrogen economy," because soothsayers kept predicting there would be so much so called "renewable energy" that we could afford to waste it by storing it by wastefully making a dangerous difficult to handle gas with a critical temperature of 33 K.

We should expect to see our yearly maximum this year at somewhere around 423 ppm.

The assholes still go on cheering for this dangerous fossil fuel marketing scam, basically cheering for fracking, until the gas runs out and, like Germany, we run for the coal mines again. We note that these marketing people don't give a shit about the rise in dangerous natural gas; they're so oblivious they actually cheer for this outcome.

Basically the salespeople for so called "renewable energy" are rather like the sales people for hydrogen inasmuch as they don't give a flying fuck about climate change.

To them the release of trivial harmless amounts of background tritium is a big fucking deal. The death of millions of people each year from air pollution, the rising death toll associated with extreme weather, the failure of crops, floods, droughts, deaths from unlivable wet bulb temperatures doesn't mean shit to them.

Speaking only for myself, I find people with their heads so far up their ass as to hype this kind of stuff disgusting.

[Finishline42]

4. It might have escaped you while you were jumping up and down DQIIIIIIII

But the slope of the curves for Wind and Solar indicate the continued increase in installations coming online.

And yes wind and solar depend on fossil fuels to fill in when they aren't available. But also with the increase in wind and solar there has been an increase in battery storage. Transmission lines from the wind belt East would also help.

But as I have said in the past and you have pointed out as well - when a utility uses wind and solar output instead of the output from a natgas plant- it increases the cost of power from those natgas plants. Which of course means that more wind and solar will be brought online.

Something that is probably not lost on utility planners - natgas going from $3 to $8 and now back down to $2 a unit. Last thing they want to try to plan for.

I also noticed that the increase in the use of natgas came pretty much at the expense of coal. Not a bad thing in my view...

[NNadir]

5. It has obviously escaped the entire antinuke community that climate change is getting worse.

I oppose any use of dangerous fossil fuels, something I make clear.

It has never escaped me that the sunlight is not constant, nor is the wind, and that it is appropriate to waste energy and kill people because people have been hyping unsustainable, unreliable, expensive material and land intensive junk for half a century while the atmosphere collapses.

The battery/hydrogen fantasies only make the material, pollution and land costs of so called "renewable energy" worse. Replacing all of the world's energy infrastructure every twenty years because there are assholes who think that disposing of a reactor core will kill someone in the 25th century should be, for any ethical person, absurd.

Of course, anti-nukes are not only disinterested in environmental issues, including climate change, they have no sense of ethics, which is why they've never bothered to learn a fucking thing about energy justice, social costs and sustainability.

And of course, we always have anti-nukes cheering for gas; they think fracking the shit out the continent so that future generations will have fucked up groundwater to go with a destroyed atmosphere, vast stretches of wilderness rendered into rotting industrial parks, and all the world's best ores mined and rendered into diffuse landfill is all wonderful.

Here's the real, real, real, real "amusing" thing - if solipsism is really amusing - about this set of bourgeois car and battery worshiping self absorbed fools: They complain endlessly about so called "nuclear waste" even though there are zero cases among them who can show that the 70 year history of used nuclear fuel has killed as many people as air pollution will kill in the next six hours, about 4500 people. Nor do they give a shit about the death and destruction associated with extreme weather.

Every fucking word out of this set of soothsaying nincompoops shows as much.

We're pushing 421 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it's getting worse faster than ever, and still we have the "renewables will save us" cults demonstrating, like anti-vaxxers, that no amount of information will change their minds.

I repeat, not that antinukes give a rat's ass about the environment:

Last edited Tue Mar 28, 2023, 11:47 PM - Edit history (1)

The fact is that there has never been a country that has enough wind or solar garbage trashing vast land areas to embrace stupid fantasies like say, hydrogen.

Every so called "renewable energy" system requires redundant systems, almost always gas in the United States, because we have so many assholes willing to cover the destructive and permanent fracturing of the continental bedrock - through much of our waterr travels.

And then we have assholes who want to waste energy by attempting to store it.

Here's the only fact that matters, the one about which illiterate anti-nukes couldn't care less:


March 27: 420.91 ppm
March 26: 420.95 ppm
March 25: 420.73 ppm
March 24: 420.82 ppm
March 23: 420.75 ppm
Last Updated: March 28, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

It took 7 years, 10 months, 30 days days since we first saw readings over 400 ppm, in the week beginning 05/26/2013 until the week beginning April 25, 2021 when we first saw values over 420 ppm.

It took 9 years, 1 month, 22 days, to go from the first reading over 380 ppm in the week beginning 04/04/2004 to the aforementioned first time we saw readings over 400 ppm.

It took 11 years, 10 months, 11 days to go from the first time we saw readings over 360 ppm, in the week beginning 5/24/1992.

It took 12 years, 2 months and one day to go from the first time we saw readings over 340 ppm in the week beginning 3/23/1980.

[Finishline42]

6. How much worse would climate change be without the 14% that wind and solar contributed in 2022?

Why is ok that you use a battery in your cell phone (or the battery in your hybrid) but not OK for a utility to use batteries to manage the output of wind and solar?

So instead of sending excess electricity to the grid and driving down prices, use that to charge batteries or pumped hydro storage and use the stored energy during peak demand periods. EIA says it's approx 80% efficient.

Utility-scale batteries and pumped storage return about 80% of the electricity they store

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46756

You at various times jump up and down about expensive energy (Europe this past fall and winter) but how much of our situation is due to cheap energy? How many of our residential and commercial buildings were built when the cost of energy was so cheap it didn't make sense to design and build with energy efficiency as one of the primary design objectives?

In 2021, the combined end-use energy consumption by the residential and commercial sectors was about 21 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu). This was equal to about 28% of total U.S. end-use energy consumption in 2021.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=86&t=1

I have one question for DQIIIIIIII - do you think we are past the tipping point?

[NNadir]

7. Repeating this delusional "percent talk" chanting will not change...

...reality.

The solar and wind industry, for all the years antinukes have been carrying on to build this worthless junk at a cost of trillions of dollars, was never about attacking climate change.

The Germans didn't build all that rickety junk that will be landfill in 20 years because they were concerned about climate change.

They deliberately destroyed valuable climate change gas free infrastructure to switch from nuclear to gas, and when the were embarrassed by the fact that Putin used all the money they sent him to kill Ukrainians, they switched to coal.

The wind and solar industry can't even match in it's totality, after half a century of wild cheering, the year to year growth in the use of dangerous fossil fuels about which its antinuke sales team have never given, and currently don't, give a shit.

Instead they hype endless Rube Goldberg schemes of redundancy, all in the form of soothsaying and what if statements, to represent that their unreliable, expensive and environmentally odious junk isn't driving energy poverty and the destruction of the planetary atmosphere. But when the wind isn't blowing and the sun not shining, the burn fossil fuels, killing people and driving climate change.

All the chanting about hydrogen and batteries is wishful thinking, and any effort to embrace this pixilated scheme will do exactly what all the antinuke rhetoric has already successfully effectively accomplished, vast irretrievable destruction by appeals to fear and ignorance.

Have a nice day.

[Mickju]

8. You are, of course, correct.

[orthoclad]

10. I notice the solar curve

reflects only "utility-scale" projects.

As of 2020, 3.7% of homes and 1.6% of commercial buildings have solar installations. This is significant.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/10/28/nearly-4-of-u-s-homes-have-solar-panels-installed/

I'm sure the number is much larger now. These small installations not only add power to the grid, they take load off the grid at peak demand hours. Distributed power nodes are more robust than heavily centralized large plants. Lay this robustness against economy of scale for large installations.

I'd like to see small-scale solar and geothermal take a bigger bite out of the energy demand. Especially geothermal. Not long ago, NPR featured an interview with an entrepreneur who said his company could convert old coal plants to geothermal within weeks.

I think every parking lot should be covered with panels.

[Finishline42]

11. You bring up a valid point...

I have a small grid tied system, I had to register it's capacity in order to be able to connect to the local grid. They know what it's capable of producing but don't know exactly. What they do know is how much it produces in excess of what I use. Of course they can project how much $$$ they lost based on prior years usage. But to your point, who is keeping tabs on these systems?

These small installations not only add power to the grid, they take load off the grid at peak demand hours.

When my system is producing more than I use and I am sending power to my neighbors - what is the benefit to a local supply vs power being sent from 15 miles away? (addressing line loss)

[orthoclad]

12. A lot of advantages to distributed power

Avoiding line loss is one. That's minimized by using high-voltage lines, but I had one of those come down near me in a windstorm recently. Dangerous.

Which brings me to my second point of robustness. Two things have been interrupting power to homes lately: weather disasters and terror attacks. I'd really like to see a mixture of solar homes and microgrids densely embedded throughout the country. This would provide communications and medical power in emergencies to neighborhoods. Puerto Rico experienced this after Maria. When the grid for the whole island went down, a solar-equipped town center kept communications, lights, and medical equipment going. They have now completed a town-sized solar microgrid which will be hurricane-proof. We should emulate this and be less dependent on power lines, substations, and utility-scale power plants. Especially with increased storm and terror activity.

Power grids are highly stressed on summer days, with huge demand for air conditioning. This demand will rise. When the Pacific Northwest had its excruciating 100F+ heat wave, almost no one there had AC because they had never before needed it. They're buying AC now. The increasing severity and frequency of heat waves will lead to much more installed AC. My old neighborhood used to have transformers blow all the time in summer. If a percentage of houses in an area are not drawing on the grid or even adding to the grid, transformers won't blow. More robustness.

Individual utilities keep track of how much power is supplied thru net metering of solar homes, via individual home billing. I don't know if anyone is compiling national figures on that. It's easier to gather stats on production by utility-scale projects. But small-scale solar will be a bigger player in power production over time.

[NNadir]

13. Distributed power is distributed pollution.

The first example of distributed power is the automobile, which has been an environmental disaster of the first order precisely because it has proved impossible to reconcentrate all the related products.

People who keep claiming that solar energy is good for addressing demand for air conditioning have obviously never looked at a grid's demand curve which tends to peak in the early evening hours.

It is very easy to get stats on power demand; I frequently check the power demand stats at CAISO, in that gas dependent, "renewable energy will save us" state of California. I check it frequently, and in general, it confirms just how useless and unreliable all of that so called "renewable energy" can be, and the extent to which it depends on burning dangerous fossil fuels and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere with no intention of cleaning it up.

Feed in tariffs are just another way to subsidize the wealthy at the expensive of the poor.

[NNadir]

14. One of the interesting things about antinukes, is their spectacular lack of knowledge of demand...

...curves.

One can look at pretty much any grid anywhere on the planet and see that peak demand usually takes place in the early evening.

If one doesn't ever look, one can always just make stuff up in bourgeois la-la land.

[Finishline42]

15. It's fairly well known and acknowledged

It's also why utilities are buying utility scale battery storage.

A record 4.8 GW of utility-scale non-hydropower storage was established in the U.S. in 2022, bringing total capacity to 11.4 GW, according to Sustainable Energy in America 2023 Factbook released Thursday by BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

BTW, IIRC, over half was installed in CA and TX.

[NNadir]

16. The soothsaying about batteries is another way that the so called "renewable energy" scam...

...will represent an appalling attack on sustainability and the environment by people with low appreciation for, or total indifference to, social justice and environmental sustainability.

In general, whenever people are forced to pay for redundancies, the cost is not borne by the bourgeois assholes advocating for this stuff, but by the poor, and in the case of batteries, the enslaved.

(Please spare me the cobalt-free soothsaying, all this fucking soothsaying is not only killing people, it's killing the planet, not that antinukes have even a modicum of a smidgeon of a fragement of concern about the environment. The results of half a century of "renewables will save us" soothsaying are in:


March 29: 421.60 ppm
March 28: 421.40 ppm
March 27: 420.91 ppm
March 26: 420.95 ppm
March 25: 420.73 ppm
Last Updated: March 30, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2)

But no matter, trying to discuss ethics with anti-nukes is surely a losing cause.

This said, I have calculated the material implications of what a German effort at covering their months long real episode of Dunkelfluate would have required for this coal burning anti-nuke hellhole would have been.

The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event.

...The specifications say that each Powerwall® weighs 114 kg, meaning that 30,369,600,000 kg of Powerwalls® would be required just for Germany.

According to Forbes, 15% of the weight of a Tesla Powerwall is cobalt, mined by Elon's happy Congolese slaves, meaning that the happy Congolese cobalt slaves would be required to mine and isolate 4,555,400 metric tons of cobalt to make Powerwalls® to cover this instance of Dunkleflaute with batteries.

This is 31.63 times as large as the world production of cobalt in 2021 according to the US Geological Survey

I'm sorry!!! I forgot to use "percent talk!" The demand for cobalt to cover month long Dunkleflaute in Germany observed in Nov-Dec 2022 would be 3163% the demand for all the world cobalt supply in 2021.

The calculations are strictly "back of the envelope" but doing calculations of this type can, in my opinion, eliminate the risk of mouthing insane wishful thinking rhetoric...

Were they even to try this disastrous fantasy of building enough batteries to make that racist asshole Elon Musk even richer, build a range of mountains of Powerwalls® all higher than Zugspite in the German Alps, they would need to replace them every 20 years or so, not that anti-nukes give a rat's ass about future generations; clearly they don't, which is why they carry on so fucking insipidly about things like the cost of the Vogtle nuclear plants, both of which will be operating as the 22nd century approaches, and perhaps after it has started.

I suggest finding some uneducated idiot to believe this stuff; I wouldn't recommend trying it on well educated informed people.

By the way, "IIRC" this summer, during the climate induced extreme temperatures in both Texas and California, if someone looked at the grid status during that anti-nuke driven event - I did - both California and Texas were burning huge quantities of dangerous natural gas, the stuff antinukes like to praise as "green," and were dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere with no plans ever to remove it.

Of course, if one looked at those grids during periods when the wet bulb temperatures were high enough to kill a human being without access to air conditioning in parts of California and Texas - as I did - one would understand something about demand curves.

Since there are people with such a limited base of information, who nonetheless feel smug enough to lecture with disinformation on the opportunity for solar energy to address demand peaks, we can assume that they did not look - as I did - at the grid situation on those days.

California and Texas are prime examples on why the "renewables will save us" scam put forth by antinukes is nothing more than dangerous fossil fuel apologetics. There are reasons that gas and oil mining companies put so much effort into pretending to endorse so called "renewables." It's a marketing expense to secure their business.

Have a nice day.